My experience with homeopathic "remedies"

As an open minded woman I've experimented with homeopathic remedies on three occasions. One time for flu, another time for a rash and yet another time for a fever in relation to a spider bite. In the spider bite instance the symptoms (swelling, fever, nausea, necrosis) kept worsening as had taken the homeopathic substances. The morning after the evening I started taking antibiotics and other evidence-based medicaments all the symptoms had improved drastically and kept doing so. The homeopathic remedies probably didn't work because I didn't believe in it to start with, as placebo is the only effect these sugar pills can ever have. Of course this is just anecdotal, but it's supported by the vast number of studies that indicate that homeopathy is no stronger than placebo.

People who push homeopathy point to a number of studies they claim support the efficacy of homeopathy, such as the Benveniste experiments of water memory, where two of the researchers were payed by the homeopathic company Boiron to falsify results. That's (together with poor blinding and randomization and other systematic errors) why they failed to replicate the results in further controlled conditions. Funding bias is a real thing which exist in both alternative and conventional medicine, sure, which could be mitigated by creating a culture of integrity and honesty, which in turn would make the scientific method even more integrious. Although, every single peer reviewed study discloses who did the work, where the funds came from, and any eventual bias risks. It also shows the method for testing, the test results as data, as well as the interpretation. The most critical thing: peer reviewed study is measurable and it's repeatable. The whole point is that you, or another scientist, can go out and do the test and get back similar data.

Another study that homeopathy supporters have pointed to is the following: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14734789

In this study they used a 10% significance level which is quite weak (you want at least 5%). The study in no way proves that an inert substance has actual medicinal values. Furthermore, the study show very modest pain reductions for a few people getting homeopathic remedies compared to placebo in people with fibromyalgia (I won’t even go into the obvious problems and moral issues of using suffering fibromyalgia patients for this type of thing). These are the kind of effect sizes that you really need independent replication to believe, which we already know is a problem for homeopathy.

Furthermore, if you look at table 2 in the study, you will see that there are no statistically significant differences between the two groups on any of the measures. The researchers elected to adjust the values for some of the differences in baseline measures, and it is the adjusted values that show statistically significant differences. That these two analyses lead to divergent results weakens your ability to draw conclusions from the data. And it invalidates any claims of certainty. What I'm baffled over is that this study was accepted in a peer-reviewed journal.

The fact remains that there has been no studies whatsoever of the efficacy of homeopathy with proper controls that has been able to reject the null-hypothesis.